Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

We have a group optional eod meeting daily where anyone with any last minute questions can ask them to anyone attending, but also if no one has questions socializing is welcome. Friday people talk about their weekend plans. Monday people talk about their past weekend. Sometimes people actively show off their pets. It’s fun and the fact it’s optional (like truly optional, someone who rarely attends them just got promoted) makes it best of both worlds imo. Rarely lasts more than 15 min, and fun convos can take 45 with people dropping when they want.

Just here for ideas. One of the things i always felt would make my life easier as an employee is if I knew my manager's way of working. Like does she value speed over precision, how early in ideation can i approach her for feedback, and so on. Probably makes her life easier too if we knew what she wanted. You learn that in office through iteration and a lot of casual chats - where you get to know others - but how do you accomplish that in remote? Are there teams which have done something around this?

I am not a big friend of rituals. They feel artificial to me.

I have started to call people on Teams like we did when we had only phones. No planned meetings, no “do you have time for a call?”, just call in the same way I would walk over in the office to chat with somebody. Others have started doing this too and it feels way less formal. I also have told people stop saying “sorry for interrupting “ when they call. It’s my job to help them and I get paid for it.

As scrum master I tend to repeat all the time that the number one duty of everybody is to notify me when they run into a blocker they can’t resolve themselves. Or even better, call the person who can help. Call them now.

All in all, I try to create an environment with direct communication so things get resolved quickly. I feel with remote work there is a temptation to formalize every interaction into a planned meeting so things that could get resolved in a five minute chat suddenly need days of going back and forth until people talk to each other directly.

> record every video conference

Why? I think that's useful for onboarding sessions; or presentations about architecture, methodology, ect.

But no one's going to go back and comb through presentations like this. It's more time efficient to take good notes.

> Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos.

I'd rather talk about my weekend in the pre-post meeting chit-chat.

---

What I think is important is that:

1: Everyone is on the same page about time management and running effective meetings. Once the "meetings as procrastination" culture sets in, that can be extremely hard to break.

2: Periodic face-to-face meetings. How this happens will differ dramatically by company. For example, if everyone lives ~90 minutes from the office (or co-working space,) you can have a soft requirement for ~1-3 days a month face-to-face. But, if people have to travel by plane, you can have 1-3 annual trips to a central location; or 1-3 annual trips to the main office.

Our fully remote 10 person team has a very brief daily standup, and 20 minute standdown. We also have a biweekly demo to which we invite leadership.

I sent out an anonymous survey recently, and everyone wanted to keep doing each element of this, and thought it was very beneficial. People also said they wanted more planning, more pair programming, and more context given in people's standup/standdown updates. Only one person said they didn't want more collaboration.

We recently introduced doing some planning every 8 weeks; plan is fly to the home office, spend a week having those spontaneous in person conversations that are hard to replicate. We've done two of these ad-hoc, everybody liked them, so we decided to make it a thing.

Every day we choose stand down ordering by answering some random dumb question with a unique answer and the rule "un-serious answers only", e.g. "What is your favorite color? RGB values only", answer "#FACB12", "My favorite color cannot be represented via RGB." or and then arbitrarily ordering it, e.g. "alphabetized by third letter in answer", or "most pedantic response", or whatever. It adds some human flavor without forcing any Bonding™. It's a nice light touch way to give the opportunity for banter without forcing it.